California is Paying Other States to Take Its Solar Energy - Newsweek

[Caribbeans]

Solar panels in the Mojave desert, near Lake Tamarisk. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright/The Guardian

California is Paying Other States to Take Its Solar Energy

Newsweek.com | Dec 04, 2024

California is producing so much clean energy using solar farms that it sometimes has to pay utilities in other states to take some of it away.

The news comes in a Los Angeles Times report which also says in the past 12 months California has forgone enough solar energy to power 518,000 homes for a year (three million megawatt-hours), due to supply exceeding demand and an inability to store the surplus.

California produces more solar power than any other state and has a law stating that by 2030, at least 60 percent of its electricity must come from renewable sources. The Golden State also has the second most expensive electricity in the Union, behind only Hawaii, at around double the national average.

When California's solar farms produce a surplus which battery storage cannot handle, to prevent grid overload, the state exports power. This is frequently sold at below the market rate, essentially subsidized by California energy consumers, and at times other states have to be paid to take surplus electricity if they have no demand for it...more
https://www.newsweek.com/california-producing-too-much-clean-energy-paying-other-states-take-it-1995346

Power to gas How to store renewable energy

[byronius]

1. This is awesome!

I live in California, and this is exciting.

[usonian]

2. Send it my way and pay me to absorb it.

I dread my next PG&E bill.

PG&E murdered countless people by faking maintenance of its lines. They got judgments against them and went into bankruptcy. MERCIFUL someone or other took them out of bankruptcy, and the Public Utilities Commission allowed them to about double rates (for that “free” solar power).

They are a monstrosity, with “regulatory capture” and

A. Their executives should have gone to prison for life for some degree of murder,
B. They should NOT have been allowed out of bankruptcy. The state should have taken over their operations and we have ALL the tech and business brains to do it right.

The shareholders should have gotten 20 cents on the dollar, like us meaningless CUSTOMERS do when we pay 5X the actual cost of electricity to repair their hundred year old lines, wooden poles in dense forest (I see the helicopters checking lines and clearing of SOME power line areas)

I use so damn little electricity except a few months in the summer, so payback on solar might be 20 or 30 years, so forget that.

Oh, and charge monster energy hogs like X and Facebook MORE for their insane power use rather than less, with more coming every day. A college student just posted on Hacker News how they can start a new “Ai” company with no experience and no money. It’s about that time when taxi cab drivers talk about starting up AI companies.

Only losers in this game are idiot customers. Who the hell do you think pays other states to absorb this excess? YES, US SLOBS trying to keep from passing out in the heat. IN OUR HOMES.

F them to hell. Crony Regulatory Capture Capitalism at its deadly worst.
People died and lost their homes, burned to the ground because of PG&E’s criminal operation.

No jail time? No. They get bonuses for murder.

Peace.

[NNadir]

4. PSE&G needs far more power lines than other states because...

...it has "invested" heavily, in response to wildly believed but nonsensical claims about what is and is not "green," in unreliable plants requiring redundant systems.

The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant routinely puts put more energy, the unit of which is the Joule (often expressed as MWh) and not units of (often dishonestly using peak) power than all the wind turbines in California, spread over more than 1000 square miles. It does so on a 12 acre footprint.

This dishonesty, referring to peak power rather than energy persists.

We have around here antinukes declaring that solar energy is "cheap." How is it then that California, the largest producer of solar electricity, has the second highest electricity rates after Hawaii?

The answer lies in full system costs LFSCOE, which includes the cost of redundancy and transmission, as opposed to the widely used and dishonest metric LCOE.

Reliable and continuous systems with low environmental impact, which in California consists of its only remaining nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, if one considers that hydroelectricity is subject to drought conditions, are cheap and safe. Unreliable systems are neither, given the many fires resulting from the need to over build transmission lines subject to sparking in California's case..

California like Germany is a poster case for the real cost of so called "renewable energy."

Of course the OP is posted to advertise for hydrogen fantasies, another example of redundancy that is also a scam that fronts for the fossil fuel industry.

Have a nice day.

[Caribbeans]

5. We don't need "Tariffs", we need a

REVOLUTION

That guy, John Lennon and Thomas Jefferson agree

[usonian]

7. Our party needs a grassroots revolution.

A grassroots revolution is needed for the party to win.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/13244015

Leaders and party "officials" are silent on death threat lies and even our great values.

Doing

[marble falls]

3. Texas gives away it wind power at night.

[NNadir]

6. How anyone can look at that grotesque array of glass in that top picture and not be disgusted and appalled...

...strikes me as insane.